Trump lashes out at NYT reporter Maggie Haberman with slew of insults

Theresa Braine, New York Daily News on Mar 16, 2026

By clicking submit, I authorize Arcamax and its affiliates to: (1) use, sell, and share my information for marketing purposes, including cross-context behavioral advertising, as described in our Privacy Policy , (2) add to information that I provide with other information like interests inferred from web page views, or data lawfully obtained from data brokers, such as past purchase or location data, or publicly available data, (3) contact me or enable others to contact me by email or other means with offers for different types of goods and services, and (4) retain my information while I am engaging with marketing messages that I receive and for a reasonable amount of time thereafter. I understand I can opt out at any time through an email that I receive, or by clicking here

NEW YORK — President Donald Trump resurrected a pet nickname for New York Times White House correspondent Maggie Haberman in his latest salvo against female reporters, threatening to sue her and the newspaper while hurling insults at the veteran journalist.

“Maggot Hagerman, just another SLEAZEBAG writer for The Failing New York Times, insists on writing false stories about me, even though she fully knows and understands that the exact opposite of anything she says is usually the truth,” he wrote Saturday on Truth Social. “In any event, I’m thinking of adding Maggot, and some of her ‘associates,’ into my Florida based Lawsuit against The Times which, very happily, seems to be proceeding nicely.”

Haberman, a former New York Daily News reporter, has been covering Trump for two decades and penned bestselling biography “Confidence Man: The Making of Donald Trump and the Breaking of America,” published in 2022. She is reportedly at work on another Trump book with New York Times colleague Jonathan Swan.

The correspondent worked with a team that won a 2018 Pulitzer Prize for covering investigations into Trump advisers’ Russia ties – reporting what he called the “Russia Hoax.”

She’s also a political analyst for CNN.

Over the past few months, Trump has lobbed insults at female reporters such as“ugly,” “insubordinate,” “stupid and nasty,” “obnoxious,” “terrible,” “very aggressive,” and the most notorious of all, the admonition, “ Quiet, piggy” to a Bloomberg reporter asking why he hadn’t released the Epstein files as required by law.

The archives of the late billionaire financier and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein cropped up again when Trump chastised CNN chief White House correspondent Kaitlan Collins for not smiling when she asked him a question about the victims.

On Saturday, it was Haberman’s turn – again. Trump dubbed her “maggot” as far back as 2023, apparently triggered by her coverage of his trial on business fraud charges.

The latest barrage came just a few days after Haberman appeared on Thursday’s edition of “The Source with Kaitlan Collins” to discuss the war being waged on Iran and its effect on oil prices stemming from the country’s retaliatory attacks on oil tankers in the Strait of Hormuz. After Collins read a Truth Social statement of Trump’s calling the U.S. the world’s largest oil producer and saying that “when oil prices go up, we make a lot of money,” the anchor countered with, “Of course, maybe wealthy oil investors will.”

Both Collins and Haberman said they’d been deluged with texts from acquaintances alarmed about his implication that higher oil prices were beneficial.

“This is not something that most of the people in his orbit right now are having an easy time messaging or solving,” Haberman said.

Haberman’s latest Trump-related story was about the firing of Kristi Noem from her post as Secretary of Homeland Security.

----------